From the 18th to the 20th centuries many societies saw radical transformations in the form of industrialization, urbanization and rising rates of literacy. These brought a greater awareness of politics, a remoulding of political values, and the rise of new ideologies.
One of the most important of these new ideologies was nationalism. Nationalism – or at least a belief that the good of a given nation mattered most – had long been present in powerful sovereign states such as Russia and China, which owed no allegiance beyond their own frontiers. The Chinese had long referred to their empire as ‘the Middle Kingdom’, implying that it was the centre of the world. In Europe, the rejection of papal authority by many Protestant princes during the Reformation reflected a desire for complete control within a state’s own borders. But such versions of nationalism tended to represent only the interests of the ruling élites. Long-established European empires such as that of the Habsburg family, which ruled over a wide mix of nationalities, defined themselves largely in dynastic terms.
France and England had for some centuries sought to define themselves as nation-states, but again this came largely from the centre. Although within the frontiers of France people spoke many different languages, from Breton to Basque, kings and governments long upheld the sole use of French, and in 1635 Louis XIII established the Académie française as the ‘guardian’ of the language. England, occupying as it did the greater part of the island of Britain, separate from the European mainland, had revelled in its isolation since the time of Shakespeare, who famously celebrated ‘this sceptred isle’, and whose language, together with that of the Authorized Version of the Bible (1611), commissioned by King James I, did much to forge an English national identity.
In 19th-century Europe, pressures for change gave rise to growing national demands in European countries that had long been part of larger empires – for example in Hungary, Ireland and Poland, ruled respectively as part of the Austrian, British and Russian empires. There was a large-scale, but ultimately unsuccessful, rising in Hungary against Habsburg (Austrian) rule in 1848–9, and risings in Poland against Russian rule in 1830 and 1863. In Ireland, the failed rebellion in 1798 against British rule (which had begun in the 12th century with seizures of power and land by Anglo-Norman adventurers) was followed in the 19th and 20th centuries both by large-scale popular agitation and by smaller-scale armed insurrection.
In the earlier years of the 19th century, many strands of nationalism were rooted in ideals of liberty and equality, and aimed to locate political legitimacy within nations that were ‘natural’ and cohesive. These beliefs were connected to the constitutionalist idea that laws should restrict the power of government, because its legitimacy derived from ‘the people’.
So nationalism was more than a single struggle for new territorial identities and boundaries. It also involved efforts to define what a nation really was, and whether it was rooted in ethnic, linguistic, geographical or other common factors. Many nationalists thought in cultural terms, and encouraged the use of indigenous languages. Intellectuals sought to identify the inherent features of nations, and so of national communities. These trends tended to ignore the porous nature of both natural and political borders across Europe. Ethnic and linguistic groups were not always located within specific territories. German-speaking communities were strewn across Central and Eastern Europe (already a great melting pot of peoples), including many parts of Russia. France might present itself as a monocultural nation-state, but it included many different ethnic and linguistic groups. And the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, created in 1801, contained speakers of various Celtic languages as well as English.
Linked to this quest for ‘the people’, many poets, composers and other artists based works on distinctly national or ethnic forms. For example, the composer Antonín Dvorák (1841–1904), like other Czechs a subject of the Habsburgs’ Austro-Hungarian empire, aimed to integrate elements of traditional Czech folk music into his work. All across Europe there was a growing interest in folklore and ‘national’ language. In early 19th-century Germany, stunned by recent defeats at the hands of Napoleon’s armies, the Brothers Grimm collected ‘authentic’ German folk tales and worked on a definitive dictionary of the German language.
Both Germany and Italy had long been patchworks of smaller states, with both foreign and native rulers. Although artists and intellectuals, liberals and democrats, had for decades called for national unification, this largely came about as a result of armed conflict in the mid-19th century. These campaigns were followed by pressure in the Balkans to throw off Turkish rule, pressure that had already led to independence for Greece in 1830. Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria followed. The fashionable nature in western Europe of some causes – Greek independence in the 1820s, the Italian Risorgimento (‘resurgence’) from the 1840s – showed that specific nationalisms could win international support when other states did not feel threatened.
‘Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided . . . but by iron and blood.’
Otto von Bismarck (1862). Bismarck, then chief minister of Prussia, was referring to earlier, failed efforts by liberals and democrats to create a united German nation. Over the following decade he was to mastermind the reunification of Germany by military force.
The First World War, which brought down the Austrian, German and Russian empires, created many new European nation-states, among them Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The idea that state boundaries should follow those of national groups developed as a new norm, at first in Europe, and then in the rest of the world. As a yearning for national self-determination spread to European colonies such as India, imperial structures and ideals gave way. By 1975 most of Europe’s overseas empires had ceased to exist. In many regions, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, the frontiers inherited from the colonial carve-up by newly independent states proved to be arbitrary, frequently ignoring local or tribal identities or boundaries. This has often subsequently led to civil war and ethnic conflict.
Nationalism may seek to be inclusive, uniting a particular ‘people’, but it is also inevitably exclusive. If you do not share a nation’s self-identity, you do not belong, and this has bred discrimination, if not more violent action, against members of ethnic and religious minorities. For example, the Turkish nationalism that became the dominant force within the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century had severe and sometimes lethal outcomes for its Armenian, Greek and Kurdish subjects: not being ethnic Turks classed them as aliens. This treatment contrasted with the more inclusive view that had formerly cemented the polyglot Ottoman empire.
Nationalism could also be linked to economic protectionism and to its cultural equivalents. For example, the pressure to produce works in national or would-be national languages often arose as a gesture of defiance against foreign rulers. But in the longer term it could cause crippling cultural isolationism.
National self-determination
On 8 January 1918, in the last year of the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson set out the war aims of the USA. His ‘Fourteen Points’ listed the basic principles on which he wanted the war to be resolved and disputes to be settled thereafter. On 11 February he went on to say: ‘National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. “Self-determination” is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of actions . . .’
Although nationalism fuelled the rhetoric of colonial peoples struggling to be free from European rule, its consequences in the 20th century were often pernicious. Most notoriously, in Germany the National Socialists (Nazis) used it to justify tyranny, war and genocide. In more recent times, nationalism has continued to ignite ethnic violence – as it did during the creation of new nation-states in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ became the new euphemism for the murder or expulsion of unwanted minorities, and the refugee became one of the characteristic figures of the modern world.